BizAims

2006 Canadian online shoppers VS. U.S. online shoppers.

According to a J.C. Williams Group www.jcwg.com study (discussed by reporter Dana Flavelle in the Toronto Star June 15th, 2006).

Online sales account for

• 2% of all retail sales in Canada
• 6% in the United States

Meaning a greater proportion of Americans shop online than Canadians.

Four possible considerations for this scenario

1. shopping online is similar to shopping from a mail order catalogue - a tradition that is well known among American retailers of merchandise:

- Americans have a trustful confidence in buying from a company;

- long distance catalogue shopping was never very common in Canada in the 1960's and 1970's.

2. Many Canadians buy from U.S. websites, which adds to the stats for U.S. websites sales, particular Amazon.com "back in the day" when the web was just beginning. Canadians did not buy from many Canadian sites for the simple reason that there were not many Canadian consumer product companies selling online.

3. Many of the large consumer product companies in North America are American, with branches in Canada. Canadians easily buy millions of dollars worth of stuff each year from Home Depot, BUT, conversely, you do not have many Canadian consumer product companies retailing in the U.S. - for example you don't have Canadian Tire stores sprinkled through Texas the way they have Wal-Mart stores in Ontario. So if those many U.S. consumer products stores start selling thing on line, there will be Americans, and Canadians buying..The Bay and Future Shop do sell things online, but the volume they have available to satisfy a U.S. market is much less than an American company has for the Canadian market.

4. Payment. Despite new developments in payment options, credit cards [2006] are still the preferred way of paying for stuff bought on the web, and..... Americans, per capita, got more credit cards than Canadians, and they have higher limits.

Mike Bradley, VISA Canada's vice-president of new products told Flavelle that "Canadians are getting more comfortable using their credit cards for Internet purchases" however people like Jim Okumura say that "Fears about Fraud and Identity Theft remain the biggest barriers to shopping online".